Cartridgezzz

It’s Monday, which is vile. It’s also July, whose exact coordinates in the vile continuum are too early to call, but Nothing Nice To Say reminds us all to pay our rent. I had nearly forgotten myself, and it was such a poignant, timely piece of advice that I chose to reprint it here without permission.

A new comic is available. What began as a discussion of the naked larceny perpetrated by printer manufacturers instead became some kind of bizarre skit, which is just fine by me. I’ve heard that Hewlett-Packard has a printer in the works that is actually cheaper to throw in the garbage and buy a new one than it is to replace the cartridges, and I’m torn between thinking they’re a pack of brigands and thinking they’re the smartest bunch of motherfuckers that ever fucked a mom.

You know how all of the sudden you’ll hear about some new thing, and then for some reason that thing - no matter how obscure - seems to permeate every day? I can’t throw a rock without hitting the Objective Individual Combat Weapon, which is probably not safe. I remember getting it in Tactical Ops, but I always thought it was imaginary, like a lightsaber or some shit. I thought it was some gun dork’s wet dream thrown into a game, which is probably also true, but it’s as real as any other real thing. You don’t even have to shoot a man with it, if you even point at somebody they die just out of politeness. It’s in a few recent games, most notably Soldier of Fortune 2 and Eternal Darkness, but I’ll just be here thinking about how it’s everywhere now, the sort of invincible weapon one might pull out of a stone, and somebody will mail me out of the blue to tell me how it’s super dangerous. It’s sort of freaking me out. I find the shape of it highly unpleasant to look at - the very top part projects nightmares, the middle part and the bottom part shoot devils and famine, respectively. The final version is said to drain hit points from the user.

While perusing Evil Avatar, I stumbled onto Blackstone Publishing, which I am not in the least bit familiar with. However, they have seen fit to provide us with a Neverwinter module based on one of their upcoming products, which I thought was very nice of them. I’m not sure if you recall downloading levels for Duke Nukem 3D, but since it came with the tools for its “Build Engine” a pretty cool scene cropped up around it. You could go to a place like King’s Links - which I don’t believe exists anymore, which is good, because it includes our first web-published review, which is bad - anyway, you could get a fistful of new levels to Dukematch on, and they were only like 14 or 30k. Seriously. If a map was like 30k, you were like “Whoa, this must have taken awhile.” But we had piles of these maps, because the investment upfront was negligible - even on dial-up. Tribes had a great set-up as well, most of the time you never had to download new maps to begin with - the server would just switch, and you’d be in some new place you’d never seen before. That’s how it works more often than not in Neverwinter, the Tribes way, but even when you need to download a module the compressed files are ridiculously small. Virtually no investment of my time or mind is required. Now that I’m crawling around online trying new stuff for it, it’s something I can appreciate.

Actually, speaking of which, Brenna and I played Neverwinter Nights almost all day Sunday. Invigorating. I couldn’t tell you why this game, or why Sunday, but I don’t care. I’m not one to look a gift wife wanting to play videogames in the mouth.